Destriping of the RAIDs

Destriping is the process of converting a "striped" array to a contiguous storage which can be either written to a hard disk or saved as an array image file. This eliminates the complexity introduced by the RAID and reduces the RAID recovery to the regular well-researched data recovery process.

So, using destriping you can write the array to the disk and then try to access the array data. This is only possible for a hardware RAID and doesn't work for Windows dynamic disks.

In Linux you can try to open the array image file produced by destriping and mount it to read a filesystem. Linux allows you to specify a start sector at which a filesystem begins; in some cases, this capability allows user to mount dynamic disks.

For example to mount a filesystem from within the image file on Ubuntu Linux, one should first use parted (apt-get install parted) to determine the filesystem offset from the partition table. # parted image_file_name (parted) print ... (parted) quit

Then, mount the filesystem using the loopback device #mount -o loop,ro,offset=NNNN image_file_name /mnt/recovered Note that the offset (NNN) is provided in bytes (512 bytes per sector).

There are some exotic hardware devices based on Linux in which the filesystem implementations differ substantially from the normal Linux filesystems or use non-standard settings. As a result, you cannot mount the array image file in a regular Linux system, and therefore you need to recover data.